I looked at the sky. It was one of the most beautiful blues I have seen.
"No," said Miss Middleton sadly.
"It will be a point for lawyers to argue, I fancy, what is actually meant by hail. You would probably define it at once as aqueous vapour cooled down in the atmosphere to the freezing point of water."
"I don't know. Perhaps I should."
"But 'hail' here obviously has a wider significance. I take it to mean 'anything that descends suddenly from the clouds.' I haven't 'Williams on Real Property' with me, but——"
"Come on," said Miss Middleton, "let's say it does mean that. And could you, please, keep them a bit more on the off?"
"It's no good my keeping them there if you don't."
The worst of coaching—I speak now as an expert—is that it is so difficult to know what to say when a lady whirls her bat twice round her head, gives a little shriek, gets the ball on the knee, and says, "What ought I to have done then?" The only answer I could think of was "Not that."
"I thought you knew all about coaching," she said scornfully.
"But, you see, it depends on what you were wanting to do," I said meekly. "If it was a drive you should have come out to it more, and if it was a cut you should have come down on it; while if it was a Highland fling you lacked abandon, and if you were killing a wasp——"